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I am so excited that Virgin and Google have announced that they are going to start colonizing Mars.

Although I am very excited to live on earth and have seen many places and had lots of plans here it would be wonderful to make a brand new start on a new planet.

I do have a few questions though:

1. what kind of temperatures should I expect in summer and winter? I am under the impression that winter is really cold on Mars and I suspect I will be OK since i live in Calgary already.

2. What are the schools like? I have two kids, one is 8 and the other is 4. They both need a school and I am not sure how good the schools on mars are like. Do the martians run them? Heck I guess we will be martians.

3. What is the state of TCP/IP going to neighboring planets. I heard an awful rumor that the latency would stop internet access as we know it on Mars and my son really likes to play video games.

4. What kind of electricity will I need. I know that all of my appliances and stuff are set for north american power but it would be really embarrassing to bring my big old 50 inch rear projection TV that weighs so much and then find out that the power doesn’t work.

5. On last thing. Is there good fresh fruit or am I going to have to grow my own garden. I am not much of a gardener or handyman and that would be a bit of a deal breaker.

Anyway. I am really excited and even though I didn’t sign up yet I am going to be talking to my wife tonight and giving notice at work tomorrow so I am really hoping that soon I can catch a flight.

Apparently on March 22nd from 8 AM until noon eastern time Blackberry service across North  America will be going down.

Database upgrades are being blamed and of course on the Saturday of a long weekend is either the best time or the worst time for this but sometimes you have to have these outages to improve services.

The outage has been planned by RIM but of course it is not very easy to alert all users worldwide when this is going to happen. Hope my heads up puts you at a little more piece of mind.

One of the things that has always driven me crazy is the way that in our minds we can decide what is right based on a number of factors but when you try to get that down on paper it is really difficult to judge how to make a decision when there are a few factors, not all important and different roads that we can go down.

These decisions come up at work, at home, during sports events, anywhere where things can change and that it is hard to make an easy decision

Finally a few weeks ago I found a great way to make this work, and work really well. First if you look at the pic of a spreadsheet below you can see how this works.

The example that I am using here is a rudimentary one where my wife and I were trying to decide weather to move away from Calgary or not and if so where. When deciding to move I wanted to figure out where in Canada would work and at the same time I wanted to weight each city based on jobs (for me), home prices (need a roof over our head), schools and education (for the kids), and weather (to stop shivering in Winter). Read the rest of this entry »

Two news stories today about the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war and it does not look good for HD-DVD.

First this morning I saw that NetFlix is going to move to Blu-Ray exclusively in their online DVD rental system by the end of the year.

and now

I see that Best Buy is going to prefer Blu-Ray over HD-DVD for movies